General Lance Lord, who leads the Air Force Space Command, told Congress recently, "We must establish and maintain space superiority."

The article contains numerous frightening admissions of the military's intention to spend our money to export violence off the planet. Read the quote in the Times from Pete Teets, who stepped down last month as the acting secretary of the Air Force, that "We haven't reached the point of strafing and bombing from space." Then he told a space warfare symposium last year. "Nonetheless, we are thinking about those possibilities."

In other news, a chaplain at the Air Force Academy has described a "systemic and pervasive" problem of religious proselytizing at the academy and says a religious tolerance program she helped create to deal with the problem was watered down after it was shown to officers, including the major general who is the Air Force's chief chaplain.

Maj. Gen. Charles C. Baldwin, the chief of chaplains for the entire Air Force, screened the Respecting the Spiritual Values of all People program in October and asked that the Air Force cut out segments in the program on non-Christian religions like Buddhism, Judaism and Native American spirituality, as well as a clip from "Schindler's List," the 1993 movie on the Holocaust. (NY Times, April 12, 2005)

You might enjoy this essay that was written by my friend, colleague and thinker on deep thoughts, Tom Mahon. On the other hand, you may not.

Tom is not a monk, he writes from the world as he sees it. There are political views expressed within.Revenge of the Sith: Concerning Supreme Chancellor Palpatine, President George W. Bush and Pope Benedict XVIMay 17, 2005http://reconnecting-calm.blogspot.com/www.reconnecting.com

“Only a Sith thinks in absolutes” - Obi-Wan Kenobi to Darth Vader

An early review of Revenge of the Sith, the final installment of George Lucas’ Star Wars saga, appeared in Sunday’s The New York Times http://movies2.nytimes.com/2005/05/16/movies/16star.html?8hpib